Kenya and Tanzania Top Africa in Bank Shareholder Returns, and Mobile Money Is a Big Reason Why

A new report from Boston Consulting Group (BCG) places Tanzania and Kenya at the top of Africa’s financial services sector, measured by the returns their listed banks and financial firms delivered to shareholders.

Over the three years from December 2022 to December 2025, Tanzania’s financial institutions posted a Total Shareholder Return (TSR) of 59%. Kenya recorded 36%. Both sat above the 23% global average, and above South Africa’s 24%.

The findings come from BCG’s 2026 Future of Finance report, titled “Time to Shift Gears?”, published in June and released with Kenya-specific commentary on 7 July.

What Total Shareholder Return actually measures

TSR is a simple idea. It captures the total return an investor earns from holding a company’s shares over a period. It combines two things: the change in the share price, and any dividends the company pays out. Add them together, express the result as a percentage, and you have one figure for how much value a listed company created for the people who own it.

So when BCG says Tanzania’s financial institutions delivered 59% TSR over three years, it means an investor holding a basket of the country’s listed banks would have seen the combined value of that holding grow by roughly that much across the whole period, once share-price gains and dividends are counted. Kenya’s 36% is the same measure, over the same window.

The fuller picture behind the ranking

The published report does not actually rank Africa country by country. It groups the whole continent into a single region. At that level, Africa’s three-year TSR was 24%. That is only just above the 23% global average. It also sits well behind the strongest regions: the Eurozone and the Japan and South Korea grouping (both 37%), Europe outside the Eurozone (35%), and Canada (28%).

The story, then, is not that Africa as a whole is beating the world. It is that two East African markets stand out sharply from the continental pack. South Africa, the continent’s largest and most mature banking market, came in at 24%, which is essentially the African average. Tanzania and Kenya are the ones pulling above it. That is a country-level win inside a region that, on average, only kept pace with the global benchmark.

Why Kenya scores well: the mobile money effect

BCG ties Kenya’s performance directly to its digital finance ecosystem. Platforms like M-PESA have pulled millions of people into the formal financial system and built a tight link between fintech growth and the earnings of the wider financial sector.

The scale is easy to underestimate. We recently explained how M-PESA alone brought in KES 182.7 billion in Safaricom’s 2026 financial year, close to half of the company’s Kenya service revenue. That same platform is now moving into savings, investing and share trading, which we covered when Safaricom’s Ziidi funds crossed nearly KES 20 billion.

That reach shows up in the inclusion numbers. Henok Eyob, BCG’s Managing Director and Partner in Kenya, described the country as having cut financial exclusion “from 50% to 10% in two decades.” The official data is close to that framing, though the true starting point is lower. Kenya’s FinAccess surveys, run by the Central Bank of Kenya with the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics and FSD Kenya, show the share of adults completely excluded from any financial service falling from 41.3% in 2006 to 9.9% in 2024. Mobile money is the main reason.

Tanzania’s angle: investor confidence

Tanzania’s standout figure is not just returns. It is valuation. BCG says 99% of the country’s listed bank equity now trades above book value. Book value is roughly the accounting worth of a bank’s net assets. When a share trades above it, investors are paying more than that accounting figure, which signals they expect strong future profits.

On that measure, BCG places Tanzania alongside Canada (99%) and the United States (98%), and both of those figures appear in the report itself. Across Africa as a whole, only about 54% of bank equity trades above book value. Tanzania is the exception, not the rule.

The context the report skips: Kenya’s banking scramble

For Kenyan readers, the timing is striking. The report lands in the middle of the biggest reshaping of Kenyan banking in years.

South African lenders are buying in. Nedbank is acquiring a controlling 66% stake in NCBA for about KES 110 billion, with the shareholder deadline falling on 10 July. Absa is spending up to around KES 31 billion to lift its stake in Absa Bank Kenya from 68.5% to as much as 85%, at KES 34.50 per share. We broke down the Nedbank move when it was announced.

The trigger is regulation. A 2024 law is raising the minimum core capital a Kenyan bank must hold, stepping up towards KES 10 billion by 2029. Smaller banks that cannot reach that level on their own are becoming acquisition targets. Kenya’s 14 largest banks already hold about 87% of the sector’s assets.

This is the same pattern BCG describes globally: strong recent performance, healthy valuations, and a rare alignment of conditions that favours mergers and acquisitions. In Kenya it is not a forecast. It is happening now. It also helps explain why banks dominate the country’s stock market, a point we have made before.

What BCG tells the banks to do next

The report’s advice to financial institutions is consistent across markets. Use artificial intelligence to reset productivity in a structural way, rather than trimming costs at the edges. Shift capital towards growth instead of defaulting to dividends and share buybacks. Pursue disciplined mergers and acquisitions. And concentrate AI investment on a small set of six to eight high-impact projects, owned directly by the chief executive rather than delegated down.

For East Africa, BCG’s argument is that the region has already built strong digital foundations, and can now afford to be bolder on growth.

The takeaway

Tanzania and Kenya genuinely lead Africa on this measure, and mobile money is a large part of why Kenya does. But “top of Africa” is a country-level result inside a region that, on average, only matched the rest of the world. For Kenyan readers, the more useful signal is closer to home. The same returns that make these banks attractive on paper are the returns now drawing foreign buyers into the market, and changing who owns Kenyan banking.